Jimmy Atte: Death’s unkindest cut, goodnight is not enough

When the painful news of the passing of Bacchius Moses (later Jimoh Folorunso Atte, and finally simply Jimmy Atte) was brought to me through a telephone call by the soft voice of Femi Melefa – one of the truest mentees of the deceased – many flashes and echoes from the past, running to five decades, […]

When the painful news of the passing of Bacchius Moses (later Jimoh Folorunso Atte, and finally simply Jimmy Atte) was brought to me through a telephone call by the soft voice of Femi Melefa – one of the truest mentees of the deceased – many flashes and echoes from the past, running to five decades, came tumbling down memory lane. Now, the struggle for liberation – self, communal, social and humanity – for many in our generation began with the name.
I should begin this tribute to a brother and a friend with that digression for the importance it bears to the totality of the way our lives were shaped and compelled. Jimmy and I come from the same homestead, somewhat. Ike-Bunu where Jimmy hailed from was the farthest settlement of the Okun-Yoruba speaking landmass of the lower Niger basin.
There are only a few kilometers separating Akutupa-Bunu, where I come from and Ike, Jimmy’s home. That stretch of settlements from where faith brought us to be born comprises, perhaps, one of the most ignored, neglected and deprived portions of the Nigerian polity.
By the time we were born, and until very recently, there was no evidence of governance or government presence in the whole of Bunu land. Bunu, by the way, is the other district and arm of the Kabba-Bunu local government area of Kogi State. Kabba and Bunu are the only two districts that are still left together as a local government in perhaps the whole of Nigeria. I will apologise to anyone who provides contrary evidence!
But that is beside the point I wish to make, which is that for many decades since Jimmy was born (66 years ago) the road leading to his home was more or less a bush path, passable/or manageably motor able, only during the dry season. Not an inch of coal-tar, not a second glint or jot of electricity, not a drop of pipe-borne water.
It is from this rugged, deprived and totally marginalised terrain that Jimmy Atte emerged from and from where life had shaped this colossus whose life has illuminated numerous lives in our country who have showered an avalanche of testimonies and tributes that keep pouring ever since his death was announced and the funeral rites were held to high heavens!
I met Jimmy Atte for the first time on January 10 or thereabout, 1965, at the Native Authority office ground in Kabba where we were usually fetched on the first leg of our tortuous journey to our school, Provincial Secondary School, Dekina. This first leg would usually end in Lokoja on a winding, bend-ridden death-trap through Oshokoshoko to Lokoja. Then, on the next day, we would hop into the ferry which links Lokoja to Shintaku. This usually lasts for about one hour of extreme hazard on the River Niger; then the final trip on another crownless lorry on the dusty road to Dekina, where we schooled. Jimmy was, of course two years ahead of me in school and thus a senior boy in 1965, and that meant a lot in terms of school discipline.
If you add this life of torture on the road from Ike to Kabba, then to Lokoja, to Shintaku in the boat to Dekina, you will then imagine the kind of early life struggle that the man who was later to become the hero of Nigerian television – described eloquently as the genius of the Nigerian tube, who, according to Shola Omole, current Director-General of the NTA, as the only one in the history of the Nigerian Television Authority who served with sterling distinction as the Executive Director of News and Programmes.
The struggle for liberty and self-cultivation, as I began to say began right from the beginning of his life. Abandoned by government, the churches took our communities as their possession, including our names. That was how Zaccheus Moses, Phillip Noah, Zaccheus Paul came to be our names. Some of us who were lucky got one native name apart from the Benjamin we got at baptism. Zaccheus Moses had to liberate himself from the Abrahamic traditions of both the Christian colouration and the Islamic flavor of Jimoh until he became the heroic humanist, TV genius, National Theatre re-builder, mentor and patriot, simply known in his inimitable simplicity as Jimmy Atte.
Accolades and encomiums have been deservedly showered on Jimmy as he passed on to glorious immortality. And if he were to hear a quarter of the humbling tributes read for him, golden wreaths and garlands laid out for him, Jimmy Atte must fill pleased that he had lived a rewarding life.
But why is death so cruel and unkind? Why must such a man who was born into a deprived and marginalised neighborhood; who struggled to make himself, smiling through the turbulence of unfavoured life, bringing joy, hope, fulfillment and inspiration to the lives of so many; a man who gave and gave until he bled, seeking no return from those whom he met in the larger society – in the professions, in the streets and in the dark nooks and corners of the globe – receive so much torture, so much gruesome pain and so much agony in the unkind hands of the agency of death, diseases and ailments before dying when he was just about to begin to recline and enjoy the reward of a life of compulsive industry, hard work, cultivation of excellence, meritocracy, and unbridled humaneness?
Why is this paradox of existence the bequeathal of death to the best of humanity? Why this unkindest of cuts the relish of stinging death? Why? Why is it that death prefers to grant longevity to vilest and evilest of mankind why cutting down before their prime the most valuable trees in the forest of life? And if death would take our bests, why subject them to such protracted excruciating pains and their loved ones, especially Ayodele his darling Amazon wife and his beloved children, such infinite agony before finally striking? Is it just so that it can be said that death has a sting?
But I have bad news for death. Jimmy Atte lived an exemplary life right from school until his retirement from public service six years ago. And his demise is a design of the divinities and that is why his exit was so glorious and celebrated with such fanfare, accolades, pageantry and love. It is an end and an exit which kings and elevated mortals would covet and which all of us – from Ike where he was a folk hero to the entire Bunu district where he was a leader of social transformation effort and leader of struggle as president of Bunu Students in 1972 and a frontline mobiliser of social growth.
At the NTA, he was an inventor and a radical transformer who led many on the path of self-realisation. At the National Theatre, he was a builder of venues and ideas. In Nigeria, he was a patriot beloved by the governed and the governing. In the family, he was a comforter and a beloved father. He has transcended the abyss of death into a glorious eternity.
In his life and his life-after, death has neither victory nor triumph. That is why good night is hardly enough for the man, Jimmy Folorunso Atte, a mental elephant, whose passing through this world has left the trail of a glowworm and a lodestar. Adieu, dear brother and beloved friend.